Mobile devices such as personal communication systems (PCS) and personal digital assistants (PDA) have been developed to provide access to the Internet and other network-type services. These devices incorporate wireless communications and modem facilities, enabling a user to send and receive electronic mail (e-mail), or to upload and download data through the Internet. Similarly, wireless telephones have been adapted to receive and display textual messages.
However, users of the mobile devices have ever-increasing demand for Internet access through a wireless communication network. In response, more and more wireless communication bandwidth is allocated to such devices to access multimedia (text, audio and/or video) data from the Internet. As wireless communication bandwidth and data transfer rates increase, the increase in the volume of data available to a mobile device quickly overwhelms the capacity of the mobile device. At the same time, this flood of data also overwhelms a user as the user tries to effectively utilize the data collected by the mobile device. Without proper organization and presentation of the collected data, useful and important data often goes unnoticed.
In addition, a user may use multiple mobile devices to conduct daily life. Typically, each mobile device has its own database. It is often desirable that data collected in one database be replicated in other databases especially when the collected data is useful and important to the user. However, due to the incompatibility of the traditional mobile devices, the data replication may only be accomplished by data reentry or re-visiting of information sources. Disadvantageously, the data re-entry is oftentimes labor intensive, and the re-visits are time consuming. Moreover, the user may not be able to recall the previous information sources from which the data was collected, and even if the user is able to re-visit each of those information sources, the data there may have been revised because of the time lag, thus frustrating the data replication effort.